COLLEGE BINGE DRINKING PERSISTS

Boston-A sequel to a landmark national study of binge drinking among college
students has found that despite efforts at education and discipline, binge
drinking around campuses dripped just slightly from 1993 to 1997, Harvard
researchers said Thursday.

The Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Study found in 1997
that about two out of five students - 42.7 percent - could be considered
binge drinkers. That is, they had consumed five drinks in a row for men, or
weeks before they answered the questionnaire. That proportion was down a bit
from 44.1 percent in 1993.

The survey also showed a slight rise in those who abstain from drinking,
from 15.6 percent in 1993 to 19 percent in 1997.

But at the other end of the spectrum, among heavy drinkers, it also found an
increase in those who said they not only binged but binged frequently: They
rose to 20.7 percent of the 14,521 students in the 1997 survey from 19.5
percent of more than 15,000 students in the 1993 sample.

"Disappointment is the No. 1 emotion," Henry Wechsler, director of College
Alcohol Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health and principal author
of the study, said in an interview about his reaction to the results. "It
may be we're not doing enough at all levels, and we've got to start thinking
about this in a broader context than simply educating students, which has
been the traditional approach."

In fact, many colleges across the country over the last several years have
tried to stem heavy student drinking, spurred in part by an unceasing string
of accidental deaths, ranging from car crashes to alcohol poisonings, caused
by drinking.

But the study be Wechsler and his colleagues appeared to highlight the
intractable attraction that binge drinking holds for many students, their
adherence to what many see as a familiar rite of passage. In particular, it
noted that binge drinking in fraternities and sororities, hotbeds of heavy
drinking at many colleges, did not seem to have diminished at all. In both
1993 and 1997, it found, four out of five residents of fraternities and
sororities houses were binge drinkers.

The study surveyed 116 colleges in 39 states, using self-administered
questionnaires sent in anonymously by mail. It was financed by a grant from
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The study included a breakdown by ethnicity and found that Asian-American
students, who had a binge-drinking rate only about half that of the general
student population in 1993, had increased their binge drinking at an
above-average rate, while whites decreased disproportionately. Even so, only
about 25 percent of Asian-American students were found to be binge drinkers,
compared with 42.7 percent of all students surveyed.

The findings come after years of more encouraging news, other researchers
say. Professor Lloyd Johnston of the Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan said his institute's surveys have produced findings
on college drinking similar to Harvard's, but because it has been following
college students since 1980, it can add some longer-term perspective.

"In fact, there was a period of decline in drinking and heavy drinking," he
said. "Binge drinking as we call it actually dropped fairly steadily from
the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s - by about one-sixth in the decade ending in
1996.

"But there is some turnaround beginning to occur in the last year or two,"
he said - nothing startling, but a bit of a "bounce back," that might be a
result of a lessening of attention to the issue.

Checked-by: Rolf Ernst